Open-ended Prompts:

List some questions that may get the participant to discuss his or her goals, activities, needs … follow the participant’s lead on these!

Understand how users currently interact with the Resume Index

n/a because student already has previous added a resume to the system.

Depends on the type of searching. Control-F for specific detailed searches. Use the provided searching feature for everything else. Sorting the columns is good for finding graduation date.

Didn't know about it, so didn't use it.

Discover the tools (possibly other web sites, etc.) and processes they use to post or search for resumes

Does not use any other resume services because it requires either payment or signing-up, and signing up normally requires giving an email address. So probably get spam from non-employers.

Doesn't think will get a job this way. Employers are not going to take the initiative and look at the web page. Just posts a resume for fun. Can be used as a reference to point to or to compare resumes with other people for pointers.

n/a

Wouldn't look. Instead, send email to department head or known contacts in the department so that they can send email to the department majors asking for submittal of resumes. It would be a waste of time to look. People should go to the employer, not the other way around.

For students - they can view other people's resumes. It's not a way for them to get a job.

For employers it is important to search by key words. Next for employers would be sorting by graduation date because they probably want students that have already graduated, unless they wanted to take someone out of school.

Yes. Needed because different employers ask for different formats. For example, IBM asked for a specific scannable layout so they could scan in all the resumes. Formats include HTML, PDF, DOC, etc.

Used to be once a semester; monthly touch-ups of formatting, appearance, etc.

Specific Questions:

Understand how users currently interact with the Resume Index

Posting resume, viewing it. Searching function is not really needed from the student's point of view, but comes in handy whenever needed.

After submit one search, if unfamiliar with the system, users will feel like they cannot go back to refine the search. Instead they will probably go back to main Resume Index page to select search and try again.

Should design a better search. It's not helpful for finding "java" AND "sql", but can be used to find "java" OR "sql".

Get employers to look at resumes. Somehow draw attention to the web page. Doesn't think that anyone really visits it.

Pretty easy.
New Question: Intuitive? I guess.

Not really know what logging into just by looking at it. Especially from the homepage, you don't know what the Resume Index is, you don't know you can post a resume. Therefore people don't go to the service. There's no apparent web application, just static information. It's not good enough to log in, but needs to also be clear as to what you're logging into.

See previous comments.

Don't know. Guess sorting by graduation date. It would be useful for employers to know who graduated.

No. Search takes care of anything sorting by column headers would do.
New Question: What do you think about sorting by the skill sets? Depends upon what skills are shown.
New Question: What about alphabetizing the skills? Not make sense to do this.

Right now it's hard to see resumes. Can't focus on names, they don't jump out, but the resume icons do. Perhaps put the resume column on the outside. Then you can squeeze together the rest.

"checklist" is a lame link. The resources suck. Perhaps an MS Word template because it's hard to figure out the format.

Discover the tools (possibly other web sites, etc.) and processes they use to post or search for resumes

Once tried to look for someone who was into Software Engineering to see what their resume would look like. Other than that, there's no need. Can't see how service would be helpful here.

No

No. No one looks at it.

Mailing address, phone number, email.

There are different sections in the posted resume and the normal resume. In the posted resume, added list of classes taken.

Email is better, however they can pick because it's all there right now.

Additional comments:

• It would be nice to have a link on the resumes to be able to know more about the person. Or put resume type information under the people section next to the people's names. However, it would be redundant to have the information in two separate places. Perhaps, the two should be merged to force people to see the information.
• One problem is getting people to click on the Resume Index link.
• It is everything a department's web page should be, has an "About", "People", but probably only gets a visit from a person once in a while.
• Usefulness is to compare resumes to get an idea of format and content
• Advertise to employers. Employers can sign up and post job openings. When a resume is posted, and email can be sent from the service to the employer about the posted resume.